ONE OF THE WAYS IN WHICH THE PACKAGE INCLUDED
WITH http://www.yoga6d.com/rh8-wmv.zip CAN BE
USED TO TRANSFER THE VISUAL ASPECT OF A 
.WMV MOVIE FILE TO AN .MPG FILE.

This is the VISUAL aspect. To get the sound over,
you must handle it separately then join it into
a single MPG file, for instance by extracting it
first from the WMV file. However, I wanted to get
over to some .GJP files and so in fact my focus
was to get the .JPGs out. Explore it a little bit

So, you have the mplayer installed from my rh8-wmv
and it works. You play videos successfully with the
mplayer option. There are many more programs and 
program options included. 

Step 1:
If you haven't done so earlier:
Get the rest of the config files over to /root/.mplayer/ by
going to the etc folder inside M* inside /backup5. The 
following way may be a little quick but it works and it
doesn't do anything against the working of mplayer. (If you
have deleted backup5 after the installation, that's okay, just
do the unzip rh8-wmv.zip afresh from the top as the first
time, then go straight to cd /backup5 and follow my text
rh8-wmv.txt as far as that tar -xf *.tar command.)
With the /backup5 intact, then, from a terminal window,
logged in as root, type this:
  cd  /backup5
  cd  M*
  cd  etc
  cp  *  /root/.mplayer
(And if you are prompted for confirm overwrite then, given
that you have okay files working there, give the letter n
to this question, with a lineshift pressed after it.)

Step 2:
Put your .wmv, say, myclip1.wmv, to an empty folder and 
cd into it. Have space on your harddisk for the movie
several times over (and RH8 is unforgiving if you do
not have enough space, requires reinstall in case, so
check with System Tools => System Monitor (and click on
System Monitor inside it, check that the hda with gigabytes
has much more free than used). File sizes you can see in
a terminal window by typing   ls -l    and for movie files,
ls *.wmv -l     and     ls *.mpg -l

Step 3:
Type this stuff and by this get numbered .jpg files 
representing  the entire video. (The somewhat, no, intensely
cryptic documentation and man pages for mplayer and mencoder
indicate other possibilities for conversion but this is more
a first-hand fresh'n'fruitful approach). These you of course 
can do other sexy stuff with.

  mplayer myclip1.wmv -vo jpeg

Step 4:
Reassemble the .jpgs by typing the whole lot correctly on 
one long line:

  mencoder  mf://*.jpg  -mf type=jpg:fps=25 
     -ovc lavc  -lavcopts  vcodec=mpeg4 
     -oac copy  -o myclip1.mpg

Step 5: LO AND BEHOLD YOU HAVE GOT IT!
  Test it by typing
  mplayer  myclip1.mpg

You can vary speed by varying the fps number, here set to 25. 
In a first-hand context, the question of stimulus to the mind, 
to intelligence, is in focus:- which is an entirely different 
question than how to mimick reality to effect the greatest 
illusion. In fact, there is more stimuli with less frames pr 
second, just as there is more stimuli with less resolution on 
the screen; for just as radio stimulates the brain more than 
tv in several key respects, so also does the perception of one 
static free joyous image and the perception of a pause and the 
perception of the bridge to the next encourage thinking, 
enlivening of understanding of movement. A choreographer 
writes down a sequential arrangement, where the moment is a 
key organizing factor. The moment as such disappears if you 
try to do all in one big colored hires flow.

Then you can clear up the folder with its tons of .jpgs of 
course (e.g., if there is nothing else of .jpgs in the folder, 
and you have done with them what you wanted, e.g. copied some 
of them over to somewhere else, you can type
   rm  *.jpg  -f
and that clears them away).

[[Technical note:
Naturally, you can put the stuff above into a batch file, 
called intompg.sh or something like that, by using the command
gedit and typing it over. Then you can type   
  chmod 777 intompg.sh
and when the .sh file is into a folder and you have done a
cd to that folder the    ./intompg.sh   will activate it.
Using a dollar sign and a digit instead of myclip1, e.g.
something like   $1.wmv   and   $1.mpg    will allow you
to type something like
   ./intompg.sh  myclip1
   ./intompg.sh  myclip2
and so on for a whole series of files.]]